


Assets of Hogwarts Houses, an Analysis for the Next Wizarding War

by Zoya1416



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: All Houses Are Worthy, But the characters made me do it, F/F, F/M, Hogwarts Houses, I totally meant this as gen and Meta, I'm not sorry, M/M, Meta
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-03-11
Updated: 2020-03-11
Packaged: 2021-02-28 16:28:14
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,320
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23100220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Zoya1416/pseuds/Zoya1416
Summary: Meta about the Hogwarts Houses. Mostly meta, some fic wandered in as well.
Relationships: Canon FC (ghost)/Canon FC (ghost), Canon FC/Canon MC, Canon MC (ghost)/Canon MC (ghost), Draco Malfoy/Harry Potter
Comments: 2
Kudos: 10





	Assets of Hogwarts Houses, an Analysis for the Next Wizarding War

What would a wizarding war be like if it lasted more than one battle? How would it be fought? Speculations on the Second Wizarding War if it hadn't ended at the Battle of Hogwarts, with special attention to the contributions of all Houses.

GRYFFINDOR  


“You might belong in Gryffindor, where dwell the brave of heart,  
Their daring, nerve, and chivalry set Gryffindors apart.”

The brave and daring Gryffindors of course are the combat troops, the spearpoint of any army. They blast away and charge in with any weapon they have. We see a lot of them in canon, and there’s not much hidden about them. Historically, in the real world, they used the sword, the longbow, and the crossbow. 

_Fun fact:  
The longbow took years of practice, but the crossbow could be effectively used after just a week of training. The crossbow allowed any lowly peasant to kill a high-born mounted knight with little or no training, and was seen as a serious threat to the power of the social elites. They asked the Catholic Church to ban crossbows, which Pope Urban II did in 1096._  


Gryffindors fight in formations with muskets, and ride with cavalry; they fire missiles from ships and drop bombs from planes.  
Lead at first by the indomitable and ferocious Minerva McGonagall and then Harry Potter, who raised a small army as a student, they seem unstoppable. In a prolonged war, though, they’d die if they didn’t have other Houses to support them.

HUFFLEPUFF  
“You might below in Hufflepuff, where they are just and loyal  
These patient Hufflepuffs are true and unafraid of toil.”  
Overlooked in the books, Pomona Sprout is the army’s quartermaster. She’s the Professor of Herbology and runs the greenhouses. In a prolonged war, she’s the one who makes sure the army has enough food, whether it’s potatoes and vegetables, smoked and dried meat for the long haul, yeast and flour for bread. The feasts? All under her supervision, because she is the liaison with and supervisor of the house elves.  


She has the keys for the pumpkin juice, and even the butterbeer. She also has the inventory for bandages, slings, and all of Poppy Pomfrey’s infirmary potions, She needs to check on blankets and firewood, and also coats and scarves, robes, trousers, and boots. She would have the leather for broomstick gauntlets, and food for the familiars. Are there enough quills and parchment? Enough geese to pluck the quills from? Are you going to have to eat the geese and go to pencils?

_Fun fact about parchment: How many sheep, calves, and goats does Hogwarts need to kill to obtain their untanned skin? They can be eaten, of course, but scraping, cutting, and shaping of parchment is highly labor intensive. Five centuries before the battle of Hogwarts, parchment was largely replaced by paper. Textile rags are much cheaper and can be of very high quality. So a clever Professor Sprout would set the house elves to shredding rags and soaking them, adding the colors needed, screening, pressing, and drying. This doesn’t take precise stirring and timing like potions. Ink still needs to be made, if it’s too dangerous to go to Diagon Alley, but there are many sources in and around the castle, including oak galls and lamp black._

RAVENCLAW  
“Or yet in wise old Ravenclaw, if you’ve got a ready mind.  
Where those of wit and learning will always find their kind”  


Filius Flitwick was a tiny man, smaller than his students, but unlike the other Houses who only used passwords, he required riddles to be solved for entrance. 

1.Imagine you are in a dark room. How do you get out?  
2.What gets wetter and wetter the more it dries?  
3.Feed me and I live. Give me water and I die.  
4.What is a room no one can enter?  
5.What always comes, but never arrives?  
6.What asks but never answers?

Answers are at the bottom of the Ravenclaw section

He taught dozens of charms to the students, including the classic, “It’s levi OH sa, not Levi o SA.” Banishing charms, summoning charms, cheering charms, and many more were part of his curriculum.

One of his parts in the war would be charms which could code messages, and uncode them. He taught the front doors to recognise a picture of Sirius after his second break-in in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, and to instantly lock down if he tried to break in. If he lived in the Muggle world during the second World War, he would break the Enigma Machine, and create the Navajo Code Talkers.

All this, and he was a master duelist and dispatched Dolohov, the most sadistic and cruel Death Eater. Only Bellatrix Lestrange and Severus Snape could equal him in magic ability. He was highly qualified to teach dueling.

One of his best qualities was his sense of humor. He was much more easy – going with the students, and often praised them. He’d dealt with prejudice because of a part goblin heritage, and had developed a thick skin, and sensitivity to others who experienced prejudice. 

(INTERLUDE: Intra-castle owl communications discovered when Harry Potter moved into the Gryffindor head of chambers room. He wished desperately for an obliviate before he had to see the Headmistress again, but had to settle for hiding it until he could show Draco.)

1.The correct answer is: Stop imagining. _To Filius: That's not intellectual. Just very silly. Minerva._  


2.The correct answer is:A towel. _To Minerva:Want to know what else I can get wetter and wetter? Filius.  
To Filius: That is the worst pick-up line I've ever heard. Minerva._  


3\. The correct answer is :Fire. _To Minerva: Don't you want me to feed you my . . ._ the next part is missing, possibly clawed to shreds.  


4\. The correct answer is:A mushroom. _To Filius: Are you kidding me? You're keeping the kids from bed because of the stupidest pun ever. Minerva._

_:To Minerva:Yes, I know but it's so much fun. I'll change it tomorrow. Filius_  


5\. The correct answer is: Tomorrow. _FILIUS!: The boys are hanging around trying to answer your stupid riddle with a rude phrase! It is an unholy racket of spotty pubescents with hormones! Minerva.  
_

_To Minerva: I know they're right but I'm not counting it. They stay outside. Filius  
_

_To Filius: Don't make me come up there in my fur. You will regret it. Minerva.  
_

_To Minerva: You said come. Filius.  
_

_To Filius:I will be in my fur and will bite you in a very unpleasant place. Don't test me. Minerva  
_

_To Minerva: MIN! You win. I'm letting them in now._

6.The correct answer is:A question.

_To Filius: the answer is yes. Minerva._

SLYTHERIN  
Last we come to Slytherin, a House whose principles are:

“Or perhaps in Slytherin you’ll make your real friends,  
These cunning folks use any means  
To achieve their ends.”

This seems to say that any Slytherin must be dishonest and untrustworthy; you can’t be sure you’re not the means who’ll be trampled to achieve their ends. In the Battle of Hogwarts, Pansy Parkinson betrayed Harry Potter to Voldemort, and every boy and girl in Slytherin House was sent out of Hogwarts by Minerva McGonagall. _She's unworthy. They all must be. Some of them did return later and fight, but this was largely overlooked._

Traits of Slytherins: They’re ambitious, shrewd, cunning, strong leaders, and achievement – oriented. They also have a strong sense of self-preservation. They tend to hesitate before acting, so they can weigh all possible outcomes, before deciding exactly what should be done. This doesn’t make them evil or cowardly. _This means they look before they leap._

In a real war?  


They’re the spies and double agents. They’re the language assets embedded with the warriors, and the ones who infiltrate enemy troops. They’re Severus Snape, one of the most divisive figures of the Harry Potter canon. He was hurtful to an innocent child on the first day of class, and didn’t stop for six years. He was cruel and a bully, bitter and insecure at times. The children of Slytherin certainly were bullies, with Draco Malfoy at their head.

But Snape was also very self-assured and confident of his abilities. He was calm and collected, rarely at a loss for words or taken off guard, traits which kept him alive while he spied for Dumbledore. His personal qualities also include being one of the best Occlumens and Legilimens in the Wizarding world. He’s the one who lived with Death Eaters for years, being tainted by having to perform with them and act cruelly. He did it all for a lost love; a woman who’d left him, through his own actions. He did it to protect her son, and then at the end found that the man who was supposed to be in charge of Harry’s care wasn’t planning to protect him at all. Harry had been raised as a sacrifice. He'd been protected as the one Horcrux Dumbledore had under his control. Harry had been allowed to live for 17 years so he could walk in and give himself up after all the other Horcuxes had been killed. 

The only other person in canon who goes undercover is Remus Lupin. Dumbledore would never have told Lupin that he would have made a good Slytherin, but he chose to undercut, belittle, and betray Snape with the sentence, “Sometimes I think we sort too soon.” 

He saw Snape’s strengths and assumed that he should have belonged in Gryffindor. By extension, he ignored the positive principles of Slytherin. 

In the heart of the enemy, what kind of tools would a spy like Snape dare to carry? We can consider a few. In the real world, five hundred years before the second wizarding war, a cipher was developed which still might be present in the wizard world.  


_In 1466, Italian painter and architect Leon Battista Alberti invented what was dubbed the Alberti Cipher. It's thought to be one of the first polyalphabetic ciphers ever created, and it allowed messages to be easily written as well as later decoded. The cipher contained two disks engraved with letters, which were laid over one another for the sake of creating and decoding the messages. It still might seem suspicious. Snape could carry messages enclosed inside of Exploding Snap cards, and a knife concealed in sickles or knuts. Both of the Muggle equivalents existed hundreds of years ago. Lying isn’t always bad, when you’re risking your life by placing it into an enemy’s stronghold._  


Lastly, what kind of potions could Slytherins develop?  


Other houses used potions – certainly Madam Pomfrey did. Pepper-up, SkeleGro, and Pomfrey’s pick-me-up among others. 

Dozens of potions are mentioned in canon, and there are very few attributions for creation. 

For emergency use, and possible homicide or suicide, Snape might have brewed these:  


Arsenic – slow acting, causes stomach distress, takes days sometimes.  


Aconite – carried in the monkshood, or wolfsbane, plant. A seed the weight of a heavy sesame seed can be fatal, but it takes a few hours.  


Belladonna? Mostly causes hallucination. Said to be the drug which causes witches to think they're flying around on broomsticks.  


His personal favorite could well be the tripled distilled syrup of apricot pits. Stone fruits, such as apricots, cherries, peaches, pears, plums and prunes all contain cyanide, prussic acid. Pits cracked open and immersed for weeks in syrup or brandy. This is one potion which doesn’t have to taste bad. Snape could have hidden it inside his robes, against a tiny chance he could take out Voldemort. He might had kept a vial for himself, if he saw everything was lost, except that he didn’t anticipate Nagini biting him in the throat. He didn’t promote good behavior in his Slytherin students, or curb their purity nonsense. It would possibly have given him away; he might have explained it as not wanting to look too suspicious to Dumbledore. He’s an anti-hero who did a few good things. But he’s not all of what Slytherin could be.

The strengths of all Houses could be braided together in unbreakable strength:

Gryffindors and Slytherins should be natural allies, if Slytherins weren’t bound to pureblood nonsense. They don't have to be. Dumbledore was Muggle-hating (or more accurately, he believed Muggles needed to be under the control of wizards) when he was a young man. Gryffindors and Slytherins need each other so they don’t die during battle. The foes facing Hogwarts weren’t only Death Eaters. There were giants, acromantulas, werewolves, and dementers, who might not have been concerned which House they attacked on the grounds.

Bad blood existed between Godric Gryffindor and Salazar Slytherin back to the days of the founders. The statement that every evil wizard or witch came out of Slytherin is disproved at least by Peter Pettigrew. Harry Potter is not evil but he had some evil deeds. Potter cast several Unforgiveables (which are supposed to land you in Azkaban, no trial needed) during the Battle of Hogwarts, including a severe Cruciatus on Amycus Carrow which threw him into the air and against a bookcase. This was in the scene where he and Luna Lovegood go to Ravenclaw tower to look for Rowena Ravenclaw's diadem. After he cast it, he said, "I see what Bellatrix meant. You need to really mean it." 

Minerva McGonagall cast Imperius (ditto, Unforgiveable, Azkaban) on the Carrows immediately after Harry cast the Cruciatrus. 

The Golden Trio use the Imperius curse several times to get by the goblins and rob Bellatrix Lestrange's vault. 

_None of those as as bad as the Sectumsempra curse Harry used on Draco in their sixth year._ He at least understood what the Unforgiveables did. As we all know, Harry had no understanding of the curse he'd lifted from Severus Snape's old potion book. In the bathroom scene in Half-Blood Prince, Draco's surprised as he's been sobbing because he thinks he'll fail to repair the Vanishing Cabinet and be killed by Voldemort, who's living in Draco's _house._ Which Draco had no control over. Draco is a pureblood racist who bought into all that nonsense probably until about the time he was told to kill Dumbledore because Lucius screwed up at the Department of Mysteries. Draco had no control over that, either. Your people's _cunning and willingness to use any means_ isn't working very well for you now, is it?

Draco takes the first shot, and he and Harry battle with a few spells that smash up the room; Harry cracks the cistern open and floods the bathroom. Draco starts to use Crucio on him, which would have caused unbearable pain, but Harry retaliates with a unknown spell which would have killed Draco if Snape hadn't been there to save him. Harry, you fucking idiot. You've had six years at magic school, and have learned since the first day that even mispronouncing a spell can change the meaning, yet you dared to use a spell just because it was marked 'for enemies'? Did you think at all? No. You charged into action, showing the worst example of _daring and nerve_ possibly _ever._ Not a lot of chivalry there, mate.

Worse, this likely wouldn't have happened if Harry had been a better student, and thought about the spell at all. He could have checked its likely meaning in Latin. Sectum is the passive participle of the Latin verb "seco," which means "severed." Sempra is derived from the Latin word "semper," which means "continuously." Quite literally, it is used to continuously slash at a victim. Harry's probably more very, very stupid than morally gray, but it wouldn't have mattered if Draco had died. So we can see that one House alone simply isn't enough.

Some Slytherins with known better traits, besides Snape, or at least known good actions are:

Draco Malfoy grew up.  
Phineas Black stood up for Muggle rights and was disowned.  
Horace Slughorn was morally gray, but he did inform Harry about Horcruxes.  
Narcissa Malfoy made the choice to tell Voldemort that Harry was dead; she could have said he was still alive once she heard Draco was in the castle.  
Regulus Black stole a Horcrux and tried to destroy it, leaving a dummy in its place.  
Andromeda Black Tonks left the purebloods and married a Muggle. They raised Nymphadora Tonks to be a strong and effective Auror.  
Salazar Slytherin was a Founder of the premier wizarding school in Britain. He wasn't stupid, whatever else he may have been.

_INTERLUDE  
_

__

_NOTE to Salazar: You left your 'pet' in the Chamber and didn't tell anybody after you left. Ta ever so much. Rowena Ravenclaw, Helga Hufflepuff, Godric Gryffindor.  
_

_PHANTOM MESSAGE to the ghosts of RR, HH, and GG: You didn't kill her, you left her there until they needed to hide a big secret and used her. You, Godric, was that Dumbledore dropped on his head as an infant? The boy might not have pulled your sword out of the stupid hat in time. FROM GHOST OF SS  
_

_TO THE GHOST OF SS: But do YOU still want to pull my sword? From ghost of GG  
_

__

_FROM GHOST OF RR to ghost to GG: PHYSICS, GODRIC. YOU'RE DEAD. AND SO'S HE.  
_

_FROM GHOST OF HH to ghosts of GG and SS: SHUT UP BOTH OF YOU. IT WAS BAD ENOUGH WHEN YOU WERE ALIVE.  
_

_FROM GHOST OF SS to ghost of GG: No, you're the one who always wanted me to PLANT my sw -  
_

__

_FROM GHOST OF RR to ghosts of GG and SS: SHUT IT or I'll be over there and haunt you with old lady tits.  
_

__

_FROM GHOST OF GG to ghost of SS: My grave. Now, quick before the ladies find out.  
_

__

_TO GHOST OF GG from ghost of SS: Alright, fine, it can be your turn to plant the sw--  
_

TO GHOSTS OF GG AND SS from ghost of RR. I WARNED YOU. OLD LADY TITS NOW!  


_TO GHOST OF RR from ghost of HH. Hey babe. Leave the boys alone and float those over my way, m'kay?  
_

_TO GHOST OF HH from ghost of RR. Oh, honey. It's been so long. I'm on my way.  
_

IN CONCLUSION

From the opening feast speech by Draco Malfoy, DADA professor: 

"Gryffindors are our fierce warriors, hottest with weapons. Teensy little problems with leaping too soon -" He shut up when Harry coughed loudly  


"Hufflepuffs – our creative organizers and suppliers. We'd be dead in a week without them, and that's even before we had to handle the venomous tentacula.  


"Ravenclaws - our brilliant creators of codes and charms. Duelists, and the keepers - up of our morale."  


(Draco heard Harry snort but resisted a glare at him. He was very serious. Luna Lovegood had helped him keep up 'his' morale even while she was a prisoner in his dungeon, whenever he smuggled food to the prisoners. Harry had no right to laugh about her pronouncements about nargles or anything else.)

"Slytherins—our strategists. Planners. Subterfuge. Spies if need be. Think first, leap next. 

"If another battle comes to Hogwarts, Merlin forfend, (and Merlin himself was a Slytherin) I am convinced that a new generation can learn from the mistakes of the old. All the Houses produce strong wizards and witches. All are worthy. The best of all Houses could be braided together in unbreakable strength, and Hogwarts could finally become what the Founders wanted it to be. As the colonial wizard Franklin said, 'If we do not hang together, we shall assuredly hang separately.' The Lion, the Serpent, the Badger, the Eagle, an unlikely menagerie: a brilliant whole." 

Intra-castle owl message from HP to DM: You will not believe what I found in Minerva's desk. Come up here quick and see it before I have to obliviate myself.

Intra-castle owl message from DM to HP: I'm coming. But _you_ will never guess what _I_ just heard from the Bloody Baron.

**Author's Note:**

> Yes, the questions are honest - to - goodness Ravenclaw door riddles and the straight answers I've seen posted.  
>  _Ghosts of GG and SS snicker by the patch of belladonna. "She said straight."_  
>    
>  _Ghost of HH also snickers. "It feels like I can ride a brooooomstick again!"_
> 
> _Ghost of RR turns to ghosts of GG and SS and glowers. "Don't even think about saying it."_
> 
> No, I didn't warn for the relationships because they would have been spoilers.
> 
> Also, my brain? "You just have to scribble down a few hundred words on Hogwarts Houses," you said.
> 
> "But it's not my fault Filius and McGonagall showed up!" I said.
> 
> "No, but it _is_ your fault the ghosts showed up, " my brain said.
> 
> "Yes, and whose fault was it that we lost the formatting of all those italics and had to backtrack?" I said sternly.
> 
> My brain said, "But I gave you all those facts! Don't be mean."
> 
> "And - "
> 
> " _SHUT UP! all the ghosts said. WE'RE TRYING TO PARTY IN HERE. WE'RE ALLLLLLLL FLYING ON BROOMSTICKS NOW. WOO HOO."_
> 
> My brain said timidly, "Just tell me to step away from the wikipedia and I will."
> 
> "M'kay. Night, dear."
> 
> "Night, dear."


End file.
